As I was looking over some creative writing tips for the Bolton School Entrance Examination, I found a series of bullet ideas arranged under the title ‘A Significant meeting.‘ Â It was a very odd experience to read over these ideas and feel that they were written by another

The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, ‘Aren’t we nearly there?’ And every time they passed a house, which was not very

Â Not one other word did Bradley utter all that night. Not once did he change his attitude, or loosen his hold upon his wrist. Rigid before the fire, as if it were a charmed flame that was turning him old, he sat, with the dark lines deepening in his face, its stare becoming more and m

Creative writing in a hurry requires ideas and sometimes the pressure of examinations or need/desire to ‘produce’ a story kills off our creative flow! Lists though, can save us all! Give yourself a TITLE– in this case below- ” A significant meeting.” Then

My previous blog post shows how useful it is to model your openings on the successful openings of other published writers and this second illustrationÂ utilizesÂ a ‘model’ from Pulman’s The Tin Princess.Â The book opens with theÂ followingÂ engaging first line and is a s

David Almond is a superb writer. His novels SkelligÂ and The Savage are humane, elegiac and compelling. Almond Â can always be relied upon to exciteÂ readers of all ages-no matter how reluctant! The other day I was looking for a good illustration of direct speech in a novel and f

For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These weresounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, andsometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the distantbooming of enormous drums. The trees stood up–the whole beleagueringhost